Bitcoin notched a record weekly close over the holiday, while spot ETF flows stayed strong despite thin volumes. Onchain, 80,000 BTC dormant since 2011 suddenly moved, triggering speculation about security upgrades and quantum hacks. Meanwhile, Washington prepares for “Crypto Week” with landmark crypto legislation apparently heading to the House floor.

— Macauley

LetsBONK vs. pump:

For the first time ever, Solana’s premier launchpad, pump, is being outcompeted.

In the last 24 hours, LetsBONK saw 16,439 tokens deployed, compared to 9,947 for pump. Total tokens graduated from pump’s bonding curve was at 58, while LetsBONK graduated at 203.

LetsBONK was developed by the BONK memecoin team in late April on Raydium’s “LaunchLab” infrastructure. Launchlab lets teams launch their own customized token launchpads. The move marked Raydium’s entry into the Solana memecoin market following pump’s decision to vertically integrate its own PumpSwap DEX into its own token launchpad.

It’s worth noting that LetsBONK has a recently concluded “hackathon” with a $200k price pool that may have contributed to a burst in usage for its launchpad. I suspect that it explained LetsBONK’s growth in usage, but Raydium tells me that the data tracked is all organic and separate from the hackathon’s activity.

— Donovan Choy

BTC holds near record weekly close

Bitcoin held up over the holiday weekend to notch its highest-ever weekly finish on Sunday at $109,263. The move capped a strong rebound from late-June profit-taking, driven by solid institutional flows and bullish momentum.

During the shortened trading week, spot bitcoin ETFs posted net inflows of $667 million, a strong show of demand despite quieter volumes around the Fourth of July US trading break.

Markets are now looking ahead to next week’s big macro events, with June CPI and PPI reports expected to clarify the inflation path and the Fed’s likely stance for the rest of 2025. Over the past few weeks, the consensus has shifted to two rate cuts as most probable over three.
This week is lighter on data, but rates markets are pricing in minimal odds of a July move and growing debate over whether any cuts can happen at all before year end. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has intimated it will postpone its tariff implementation deadline to August.

“Crypto Week?”

On the policy front, US lawmakers are preparing for what some have dubbed “Crypto Week.” Starting July 14, House Financial Services Chair French Hill (R-AR) and House Agriculture Chair GT Thompson (R-PA) will plan a series of votes related to the Digital Asset Markets Clarity Act — the market structure bill — and the GENIUS Act, also known as the stablecoin bill. The latter was already passed by the Senate with bipartisan support.

Ahead of that, the Senate Banking Committee is set to hold a hearing on Wednesday, July 9, titled “From Wall Street to Web3: Building Tomorrow’s Digital Asset Markets.” The hearing is set to include testimony from Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger, Chainalysis CEO Jonathan Levin, Paradigm’s Dan Robinson, and Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.

Satoshi-era coins move

Beyond policy headlines, the Fourth of July holiday delivered real onchain fireworks. Around 80,000 BTC — worth over $8.6 billion today — held in untouched wallets dating back to 2011 suddenly moved for the first time in over 14 years. Four of eight known addresses transferred 40,000 BTC (~$4.35 billion) onchain in one of the largest-ever awakenings of “ancient” coins.

Blockchain watchers quickly noted that none of the BTC was sent to exchanges, easing fears of an immediate sale. Instead, the coins appear to have migrated from old legacy (P2PKH) addresses to modern Bech32 (SegWit) formats, boosting security and lowering future transaction fees. Bitcoin’s price barely dipped.

Analysts I’ve followed see motivations ranging from inheritance planning to consolidation under safer custody, with some even speculating about longer-term implications for Bitcoin’s quantum resistance. 

Charles Guillemet, chief technology officer at hardware wallet maker Ledger, had an interesting observation: Someone had sent OP_RETURN messages to the same dormant wallets days earlier, claiming legal possession and demanding proof of ownership by October. While that prompted hack speculation, it’s also plausible the real owner may have seen those notices and proactively moved funds as a safeguard.

My colleague Jeff Albus pointed out that there’s an entire gray market economy around old wallet.dat files — copies of Bitcoin wallets known to contain funds but believed to be inaccessible due to lost keys or forgotten passwords. Although previously uncrackable, it’s possible that some of these are now being unlocked through modern techniques. A legal notice like the one sent via OP_RETURN could be an attempt to mitigate legal liability before actually pursuing these old BTC.

All told, despite a quiet macro calendar this week, crypto markets have no shortage of storylines.

— Macauley Peterson

Ethereum blocks have a gas limit of 36 million gas (Mgas) today, which roughly translates to 3 megagas per second (Mgas/s) in throughput. 

A recent EthCC talk by Justin Drake maps out Ethereum’s path to a “gigagas” era — thanks to a blossoming ecosystem of competing zkVMs and soon to come real-time proving. The following are some topline quotes (paraphrased for readability):

• “The rough goal that we have in mind is to scale the L1 3x a year…12.5 Mgas/s by end of 2026, 112.5 Mgas/s by end of 2028, and finally 1 Ggas/s by end of 2030.”

• “In order to unlock the full potential of zkVMs, we need delayed execution/proving which will enable real-time proving within one Ethereum slot.”

• “Real-time proving was considered to be impossible a couple years ago and now we have four different teams (Succinct, Risc Zero, ZisK, ZKsync Airbender) that have achieved it.”

• “A first draft of real-time proving requirements looks like…latency of 10 seconds for 99% of mainnet blocks, CapEx of <$100k and <10k watts of power.”

• “By the end of 2025, I’m expecting at least 10 (operational) zkVMs…this diversity is important for security reasons…more likely than not, every zkVM has critical bugs but diversity gives us some robustness.”

• “If you had asked me two months ago what the main bottlenecks to proving [were], I would have said the execution was the bottleneck…one of the big breakthroughs of ZisK is that they’ve accelerated that to native speed so there’s less of a need now to go build custom Snark ASICS to handle execution.”

• “Having the L1 become a powerful chain will definitely have consequences for L2s. My hope is that it’s beneficial for L2s…it may lead to much more TVL on the L1 where the L2s can benefit from that rich and vibrant hub. It may also incentivize L2s to adopt the same sequencer as the L1 to unlock synchronous composability and network effects. Real-time proving and shared sequencing will enable that.”

— Donovan Choy